Welcome

You are one of a handful of people standing between the Imperium and the things that want to eat it. You will not be thanked. You may not be believed. The galaxy is vast and uncaring and mostly hostile, and the Emperor's light reaches only as far as someone is willing to carry it.

That is the job. This book tells you how to do it.

Where this is set

The Great Rift has torn a wound across reality, and whole sectors now sit cut off from Terra and from reinforcement. No astropathic message gets out reliably. No fleet is coming. Whatever the people of those worlds are going to become, they become it alone, in the dark, with what they already had. Your Gamemaster will tell you which of them you are standing on.

@Missing file is where your character lives and where your character will probably die. It is not a frontier waiting to be tamed. It is an old, sick, enormous machine full of people trying to keep their piece of it running.

What a session feels like

You describe what your character does. The Game Master describes what happens, and when the outcome is genuinely uncertain, asks you to roll.

Rolling is a fistful of six-sided dice. You count symbols, not totals. You beat a number, or you don't, and either way the story keeps moving — a failure in Wrath & Glory is rarely "nothing happens." It is usually "yes, but," or "no, and now this."

One of your dice is different. The Wrath Die sits in every pool you roll, and on a 6 or a 1 it reaches out of the mechanics and changes the fiction — a moment of glory, or a complication nobody planned. It is the die that makes the game feel like the setting.

How to use this book, and the rest of the system

This handbook explains how to play. It does not list every Species, Archetype, Talent, weapon, or Condition — those are records in this project, and you can open and read them yourself at any time. Anything with a name is somewhere you can look it up.

So this book covers the things that aren't written on a card anywhere: how a roll resolves, what the numbers on your sheet mean, what happens when the Wrath Die turns up a 1, and how to spend the resources that make you dangerous.

What you need before the first scene

A character. That is genuinely it — no dice to buy, no sheets to print. The next chapter walks you through making one.

Read chapter 3 before you play. Read the rest when you need it.